Element locator for Selenium

What is Element locator ?

It is an address that identifies a web element uniquely within the page.

Selenium supports 8 element locators to locate element in web page.

• id
• name
• className
• tagName
• linkText
• partialLinkText
• cssSelector
• xPath

Why we need to use different locators for elements ?
1. Because developer may not provide all locators for every element.
2. Some locators are not applicable for every elements.
3. Some locators may be duplicated

id

driver.findElement(By.id("button1"));

name

driver.findElement(By.name("country"));

className

driver.findElement(By.className("email"));

tagName

driver.findElement(By.tagName("forgot-password"));

linkText

driver.findElement(By.linkText("org.openqa.selenium.chrome"));

partialLinkText

driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("inbox"));

cssSelector

driver.findElements(By.cssSelector("input[type='checkbox']")

xPath

driver.findElements(By.xpath("div[@class='mouse-hover-content']//a"));

Next